Guardians of the Galaxy may have dominated the box office in 2014, but more importantly it was well-received by its audience, earning almost universally positive reviews. While the love and adoration of the viewers is the biggest reward a movie can receive, it also doesn’t hurt to get recognition from more official channels. This doesn’t happen too often with comic book movies, but fortunately our ragtag group of alien rogues is helping to break that trend. Earlier today, the Writers Guild Awards announced their 2014 nominees, and Guardians of the Galaxy snagged a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. I bet James Gunn and his crew can get hooked on this particular feeling of accomplishment quite easily.
As almost everyone knows by now, Guardians of the Galaxy is based off the various Marvel comic books that have been published over the years. While the Guardians were first introduced in 1969, this iteration of the team debuted in the comics in 2008. In just seven years they’ve gone from being D to Z-list characters on the comic book pages to taking pop culture by storm and earning a prestigious award nomination. It’s quite a feat! Guardians of the Galaxy’s competition in this category includes American Sniper, Gone Girl, The Imitation Game and Wild. The only other comic book-inspired movies that have earned a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination have been American Splendor (the only one of these movies to win the award), A History of Violence, Ghost World and The Dark Knight.
We talked last month about Oscars we would like to see Guardians of the Galaxy win, or even just be nominated for, but this Writers Guild nomination really is an important step towards the film getting recognition from the Academy. Superhero movies are typically only nominated in categories like Best Visual Effects and Best Costume Design, but depending on how things go, they may decide to nominate it for their own Best Adapted Screenplay category. It would be a refreshing change of pace among the dramas and soft comedies that usually dominate that field. Guardians of the Galaxy has already earned multiple accolades over the last six months, including a Grammy nomination for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media and multiple People’s Choice Awards and Critics’ Choice Movie Awards nominations.
The other movies that earned Writers Guild Award nominations this year include Boyhood, Foxcatcher, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Nightcrawler and Whiplash for Best Original Screenplay, as well as Finding Vivian Maier, The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, Last Days in Vietnam and Red Army for Best Documentary Screenplay.
